Iron Council (22 page)

The graders can work. They can continue cutting beyond the ravine, toward Cobsea, still more than a hundred miles of hard wilderness away. But before they go, they want to be paid, and once again there is no money.

Very quickly, everyone knows there has been another clogging in the cash-pipes. The tunnellers are enraged. They have been working on promises, are owed months of backpay they thought the train would bring. The graders refuse to continue. It has been weeks since any trains from home have reached tracks’-end.

What is it? It is not a slowdown or confrontation; nothing is happening except an accretion of anger, looks held too long. The tunnel-headers gouge while the newcomers cut down dirty trees to make poor ties.

A tunnel-man is injured—an everyday terror in this blackpowder land, but he responds with an outrage as if it is the first time such a thing has happened. —Lookit, he says holding up his blooded hand. The red on the white dust that coats him is vivid. —They letting us fucking die here.

That night Judah goes to the hollow where the men who fuck men gather, and when he comes back Thick Shanks is waiting.
—Meeting going on, he says. —Not us, them. He indicates the lights in the perpetual train’s guntower. —We got to think. They sending riders back along the line, telling Wrightby to send money now.

There is a fight the next day with sledgehammers, between two cactus-men so massive the overseers can only watch the vegetable men crush each other’s wood-fibre bones. —Something’s happening, says Ann-Hari to Judah. They sit on a blackened half-rock split by fire and cold water and the strikes of the biggest Remade man.
—The girls are frightened.

A scattered few handwritten
Runagate Rampant
s are left at the mouth of the hill. Each day and night another fight or some petty act of anger, a headlight of the perpetual train shattered, obscenities carved into the paint.

Daily the graders gather and refuse to cross the ravine. Their foremen find other work for them. The graders are not striking, but are refusing to do what they are supposed to. They will sweep away the detritus of the tunnel, and carry tools, but if they cross that cut they will be in perhaps the last part of their digging; they will be dragging the roadbed the last hundred-some miles to Cobsea. And they will not, not yet, not now while the iron road withholds their money. That would be a surrender.

And then there is a night. The length of the train and at the black of the tunnel there are fires. The roamstars are bright, crawling by their sedentary cousins. Judah has made a golem from thistles.

—What’s that?

Judah looks up. People are staring, heading up the rock hill. They seem pulled; they move in little stuttering steps.

—What is it? Judah says, but the man he asks only shouts and points up the hill. —Look look! he says. —Come, it’s there.

There is a noise along the ridgeback of the slope as if the stones and the very bushes are resonant, are singing an aberrant hymn. People on the incline shout and begin to scramble back again, in a river of scree. Falling men careen into their friends. Judah grips roots and keeps his feet.

The tremulous song, the sound of the wilderness anxious, is loud. There is a spider above him. No no that is not, that is not a spider that great shape that cannot be, it is the size of a tree, a fat tree with branches splayed in perfect symmetry that cannot be but that is what it is, it is a spider, so much bigger than the biggest man.

—Weaver.

—Weaver.

They say it. Their voices are beyond fear, quite stripped by awe.

Weaver. The spiders that are not gods but are nearly, that are something so other, so much farther than men or xenian, than dæmon, than archon, that they are unthinkable, their power, their motives, their meanings as opaque as iron. Creatures who fight murder die and reconfigure everything for beauty, for the intricacy of the web that is the world they see, a concatenation of threads in impossible spiral symmetry.

Songs about Weavers fill Judah’s head. Nonsense-fears for
children—
He promised me her hand in mine, / then smothered her in all his twine, / the Weaver swine
—absurdities and pantomime foolery. Looking up at this thing glowing unlight or is it light over the rock edge he knows the songs for the atoms, the infinitely tiny specks of stupidity they are.

The Weaver hangs in complex stillness. Body tarry black, a teardrop globe, a glintless head. Four long legs angled down to end in dagger-feet, four shorter up, as if in the centre of a web, hanging in the air. Ten, twelve feet long, and now, what, what is it, turning slowly, slightly, as if suspended, and the world seems snagged. Judah feels a tug as if the world is tethered by silks the Weaver is gathering as it turns.

Judah makes a debased throat sound. It is dragged out of him by this Weaver’s unseen threads. It is a kind of unbidden worship.

All along the slope the men and women of the railway stand seared by what they see, and some try to get away and some stupid few crawl closer as if to an altar but most, like Judah, only stand still and watch.

—Don’t touch it, don’t fucking go near it, it’s a godsdamned Weaver, someone is saying, someone a long way below. The spider-thing turns. The rocks continue to sing, and now the Weaver joins them.

Its voice comes out from under stones. Its voice is a shudder in dust.

. . . ONE AND ONE AND ONE AND TWO AND RED RED-BLACK RED-BLUE BLACK THROUGH HILLCUT WIRETRAWL AGASH AGASP AGAPE LEGATE AND CONSTRUCT MY TIES MY EYES CHILDER KINDER WHAT STONECUT AND DUSTDRUM YOU SOUND A SLOW ATRAP TRAPPING A RHYTHM IN TOOL
AND STONE . . .

Its voice becomes a bark in time, a beating that makes the little rocklets dance on the slope.

. . .
EAT MUSIC EAT SOUND PUSH THE PULSE PULSILOGUM THE
MAGIC
. . .

Thoughts and the textures of things are snared and pulled in to the Weaver.

. . .
GRIND AND GROUND CARE AND UNCRUSH WHAT IS BEFORE
UNCRUSH UNCRUSH YOUR NAME IS RAKAMADEVA ROCK MY DEVIL YOU FLINCH INCH ATWARD OF WHAT WILL BE YOU BUILD
. . .

And the Weaver pulls in all its arms and drops lightly unreeled from its turning point in the air still sucking in what light there is and bloating on it as if it is the only real thing and Judah and the ground he stands upon and the threadbare trees he clutches are all old images, sun-bleached, on which a vivid spider walks.

The Weaver picks up its legs one by knifepoint one and treads at the edge of the ravine and it dances along it as the uncoloured women and men edge behind it and it turns its head in sly playful slide to stare at them with a constellation of eyes like black eggs. Each time it does the people who follow it freeze and haul back until it turns again and moves on and they follow it as if bound to.

It slips over the rim of the cliff and they run to see the arachnid thing pick dainty as a high-shoed girl down the sheer. It runs, it begins to run, until its huge absurd shape careers downward and it is by the roots to the bridge, the girders that spit out from the rock halfway to earth, and the Weaver leaps out and without passing through intervening space is on the half-done stump of construction, and small in the distance it begins to spin, to turn cartwheel, becomes a rimless wheel and skitters the girders where in the day the Remade bridge-monkeys hang and build.

. . .
AND BREAK AND BREAK
. . . The Weaver’s voice comes as loud as if it were next to Judah . . .
PUSH BRUSH THEY AWAIT WITH BREATHBAIT AND ADRIP FOR YOUR INTERVENTION DEVILS OF THE MOTION ELATION CITATION CITE THE SITE TOWER SIGH NIGH VEER STAR AND CLEAR YOU ARE YOU ARE FINE IN TIME YON OF THE PLAINS STEAM-MAN
. . . And the Weaver is gone and the weak night light bleeds back into Judah’s eyes. The Weaver is gone and it takes many seconds of staring at the spider-shaped absence on the bridge until the men and women of the railroad turn away. Someone begins to cry.

The next day a handful of men are dead. They stare up at their canvas or at the sky with eyes quite washed of all colour and with smiles as if of quiet pleasure.

There is an old man long gone mad who has come quietly with the railroad for miles, sitting while the hammermen swing and the whores sell relief, a man become a mascot, become a piece of luck. After the Weaver he stands above the tunnel mouth and declaims in glossolalia and then in words. He says he is a prophet of the spider, and though they do not obey the commands he gives them the workers of the iron road watch him with hesitant respect.

He walks among the forced idleness of the track-layers. He shouts at the tunnellers to put down their picks and go nude and run away north into the unknown places of the continent. He shouts at them to copulate with the spiders in the dust. They are all draped in threads from the Weaver’s spinnerets. They are knotted in a new configuration.

—We saw a Weaver, Judah says. —Most people never see that. We saw a Weaver.

The next day the women strike.

—No, they say to the men who come to their tents, and who stare at them uncomprehending. The women stand together in a militia, holding what weapons they have. A picket of rags and petticoats.

There are scores of them, determined and surprised by themselves. They turn away the hammermen, tunnel-men, gendarmes. The rebuffed gather. A counterdemonstration of surly lustful men. They mutter. Some go to masturbate behind rocks; some simply
go. Many stay.

The dust of the two gatherings rises as they face each other. The gendarmes come—they do not quite know what to do; the women are doing nothing but refusing, the men are only waiting. —No pay, Ann-Hari says, —no lay. No pay no lay no pay no lay.

—We’ll not do it no more for promises, she says to Judah.
—Since we come here and there ain’t no money, they been doing and doing it on credit. Our men, our gendarmes, now the new lads. And they ain’t had women here for a long time; they hurt us, Judah. They come and say put it on my tab girl and you can’t say no and you know they ain’t going to pay.

—Cyra lost her eye, she said. —Some tunnel-man comes, put it on my tab, she tells him no and he knocks her so hard it splits her eye. Belladona had her arm broke. No pay no lay, Judah. Money first from now.

The women defend Fucktown. They have patrols with sticks and stilettos; there is a frontline. They take turns to watch the children. There must be those among them who are not happy with the confrontation, but they are quietened into solidarity. Ann-Hari and the others swish their skirts and laugh while the men watch. Judah is not the only man who is a friend to these infuriated whores. He, Shaun Sullervan, Thick Shanks, a clutch of others watch together.

—Come on girls what’s this then, says a foreman. —What’s the story? What are you after? We need you, beauties. He smiles.

—Won’t be beat down anymore, John, Ann-Hari says. —Won’t take promises. You pay; until then no lay.

—We ain’t got the money Ann you know that sweetheart . . .

—Ain’t my problem. Have your man Wrightby pay his men, then . . . She jigs her hips.

That night a group of men try with something between lightheartedness and anger to push their way past the picket, but the women block them and beat them hard and the men retreat holding split heads and screaming in astonishment as much as pain.
—Stupid fuckpig
bitch,
one man screams. —You stupid
bitch,
you smashed my fucking
head,
bitch.

They do not let the men touch them the next day and there is no longer novelty or near-humour to the situation. A man takes out his cock, shakes it at them. —Want payment? he shouts. —I’ll give you payment. Eat this you fucking dirty moneygrab sluts. There
are those in the crowd of men who have enough affection for the women they have travelled with that they do not like that, and they hush him, but there are others who applaud.

—Get money, and come in, the women shout. —Don’t blame us, horny bastards.

There is another attempt on their camp. This time it is led by the tunnellers. It is a rape squad intent on punishment. But there is an alarm, a panic from Remade women sent to clean clothes near the Fucktown tents. They see the men creeping and yell, and the men are on them quickly and attacking to silence them. A squad of the prostitutes come running.

Men are stabbed, a woman’s face is broken, and when the prostitutes have overcome the intruders one of the Remade women is found concussed and leaking from her head. The whole women hesitate briefly before they carry her in to tend her.

In the morning the tunnel-men strike. They gather at the tunnel mouth. The foremen run to negotiate. The tunnellers have their spokesman: a thin man, a weak geothaumaturge, his hands stained basalt black by the stone he makes into slurry.

He says, —We go back in when them girls let us back in, too, and his men laugh. —We’ve got needs, he says.

The prostitutes and tunnellers have made demands. The graders will not work. The track-layers cannot, and only sit in the sun and play dice or fight. It is becoming violent like a prairie town. The perpetual train sits. The gendarmes and foremen confer. There is rain, but it is hot and unrefreshing.

—Mate with the spiders, the old man says. —It’s time to change.

Everything is still. Only the bridge is being built, and now in the evenings when the bridge crews come off their work, some cross
the ravine to their sister encampment, because they want to see the trouble. They come—hotchi in spines, apes trained and constrained by Remaking, Remade men given simian bodies. They come to see the strikes. They tour from one to another.

The newspapermen on the perpetual train, who have been despatching their stories when there are messengers, suddenly have something new to cover. One takes a heliotype of the picket of women.

—I don’t know what I’ll say, he says to Judah. —They don’t want me talking about tarts in
The Quarrel.

—Take all the plates you can, says Judah. —This is something you should remember. This is important, he says, and it is his
oddity, his beatific innard that speaks. His breath leaves him a moment at the thought that he can hear its words.